After a few weeks, all tweets on the For You stream will be from Twitter Blue users. Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, has stated that beginning on April 15th, the service would only show tweets from verified accounts in For You’s recommendations.
Musk added that the move is being made to battle AI bots because it is the “sole practical approach” to prevent “advanced AI bot swarms” from taking control. He further said that if the modification is not implemented, Twitter would be facing a “hopeless losing war.” Musk emphasised in a subsequent tweet that AI bots may pay for verification (and so appear in the For You timeline) as long as they do not mimic a human.
Twitter’s For You interface displays not just tweets from accounts a user follows, but also material based on prior tweets they’ve liked or tweets liked by other people in their network. The functionality first appeared on iOS in January as an alternative to the Following tab before spreading to other platforms. Not everyone liked it, so Twitter updated its web and mobile applications to default to the timeline tab users had open when it was published. Yet, showing just verified accounts may result in many more promotional tweets being shown to those who want to see it.
Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations.
The is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle.
Voting in polls will require verification for same reason.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 27, 2023
Considering that soon only Twitter Blue users will have verified accounts on the social networking platform. Twitter previously declared that legacy checkmarks will be phased off on April 1st, depriving prominent figures, businesses, government and non-government organisations, and others of their verified status unless they paid for it.
